REVISE THIS:Two sides of the irreducible complexity argument (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 18, 2009, 15:07 (5341 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt: Could we have been seeded from some other means, maybe even an alien race as Dembski suggests? Helluva lot more believable than a mystical driving force.-Although it's as feasible ... or not ... as any other theory, I can never see the attraction of this particular one, since it only adds a layer to the overall mystery of how we got here. If we're descended from an alien race, how did the alien race get here? As you said earlier, it'll be materialism v. mysticism again. (Apologies to BBella as this doesn't quite cover her concept of never-beginning and never-ending life.) At least we know from the outset that the question of how a universal intelligence got here can't possibly be answered, because if it exists, it's on an entirely different plane from us, and we're simply not equipped to investigate it. 

Matt: If there's no need to forcibly evolve, why do it? [...] If design is true, we should be able to see macro-evolution happen very rapidly, or we should be able to induce it. However neither of these things has been observed. -I'm not at all sure if I've followed your argument throughout this paragraph, so my apologies if I've misunderstood it. That first question is a haunting one. The simple forms of life have proved durably successful, and so they clearly didn't need to evolve. We therefore have to go back to the usual theory of beneficial chance mutations, which were not needed, but conveyed an advantage. Every single organ, faculty, sense which separates us by such a vast gulf from those earliest forms of life would then have come into being initially by pure chance. David has, for instance, asked the provocative question: How Did Sex Pop Up? Bearing in mind that it takes two to tango, and that if those two are to reproduce they will normally have to be male and female, the idea of simultaneous chance mutations puts a mighty strain on one's credulity. -The second part of your statement puzzles me. You seem to be taking just one concept of design into consideration: the designer decides to make a stegosaurus, and hey presto, we have a stegosaurus. But a designer may just as easily have designed the initial programme, allowing for a vast array of variations, and then let it run its own course. Then there would be absolutely no difference between the atheist evolution set in motion by chance and the theist/deist evolution set in motion by God. Or you can have evolution proceeding in fits and starts (punctuated equilibrium) that have been deliberately engineered (by God) or have been brought about by natural circumstances (e.g. by climate change). Of course the latter can also be interpreted as the work of God, whose scientific experiments with matter would have been conducted by manipulation of that matter and not by some mumbo-jumbo. -You suggest that "evolution is a more passive process that does its job only when it MUST". I think "evolution" has to be split up into mutations, adaptation, natural selection. Beneficial mutations ... which I find a huge problem ... are creative, not passive, since they're supposed to produce brand new features. There is no "MUST" here. Adaptations are a MUST, and natural selection is automatic, so yes, I'd say they are passive. But how does any of that make design less likely?-In your latest post about sex, on the subject of stillbirths, you ask: "If we were the product of design, why would we not see something a little more efficient?" Again, I think you're confining yourself to a single concept that equates design with perfection. Do you mean to tell me your car, TV, computer etc. never go wrong? If you rid yourself of the idea of a perfect, omniscient, omnipotent God and focus only on design, there is no reason at all why (a) the design should not be faulty, and (b) why the designer should not deliberately have created processes that are subject to the vagaries of chance. If anything, that would make it all a lot more interesting for him. And you needn't identify that with deism, because there's nothing to stop such a designer from stepping in when he feels like it. -You refer to George's view that life is too chaotic and disorganized for it to be designed. There are two separate kinds of "life" here. Life as a physical fact, in the sense of reproduction, digestion, the senses, emotions, consciousness etc., which are all so complex that some of us can't place our faith in chance to put it all together. Then there is life as it is lived, which is and always has been so "chaotic and disorganized" that some of us can't place our faith in any kind of benevolent father figure up in the sky watching over us. The first problem has nothing to do with the second. Whether God (if he exists) cares for us 100%, 50%, or 0% is a totally separate question from that of design.